Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea – obituary

Ingvar Kamprad, who has died aged 91, was the founder of Ikea, the Swedish self-assembly furniture chain.

The publicity-shy Kamprad, who spent many years as a tax exile in Switzerland, accumulated a very large fortune – though recent estimates of it varied from $47 billion down to $4 billion, according to how much of the ownership of Ikea he was believed to control.

In 2004 he was briefly reported to be the richest man in the world, having notionally overtaken Bill Gates of Microsoft in the US, thanks in part to a slide of the dollar against the Swedish kronor. But the claim was based largely on guesswork by a Swedish business magazine, Veckans Affärer, about the likely value of the private Ikea holding company if it were ever to be floated on the stock market.

Ikea responded by pointing out that Kamprad had transferred his shares to a charitable foundation, Stichting INGKA Foundation, which...